This is a great idea, but there's no mention of versioning. As a long-time advocate of what we now refer to as Semantic Versioning, I can't help but see this as a disaster waiting to happen.
> Let's say we adopt this. Cut to some small number of years in the future, and everyone is complaining about how dealing with 46-character-long opaque strings is terrible.
Agreed. You can point gx to "repos" (/ipfs addresses that map (package, version) => /ipfs/... addresses. This lets you use simple names, and anyone can publish a repo.
see https://github.com/whyrusleeping/gx#repos
> This is a great idea, but there's no mention of versioning. As a long-time advocate of what we now refer to as Semantic Versioning, I can't help but see this as a disaster waiting to happen.
Sorry, this is a documentation failure rather than a feature failure: gx has semver built in and adheres to it today.
/set_of_files -> /ipfs/[key_1]
Now, these files change because they were your GIT repo of all your projects. So what happens is that the key that represents your files changes continuously. That sucks. There's a solution. IPNS.
IPNS can point at a continuously changing set of directories, and always provide the pointer as an IPNS link. It's the mutable part of IPFS...
Now, as for the hashes... The Firefox plugin already supports looking up the DNS txt record of the IPNS key associated to your site. So, if you have a pretty DNS name, you still keep your pretty DNS name.
Now, for the versioning, that assumes that there was something prior, something now, and something that will be. That's not always the case. In that situation, a changelog could be applied as a form of a blockchain showing all deltas to the keys changed. But that can be implemented when it needs to be, and not as core functionality.